


The Country the Hart Hath Haunted

by Gileonnen



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fey Creatures and Fell Forests, Gen, Grief, Hunting as Metaphor, Landscapes Both Ominous and Sublime, M/M, Original Canine Character - Freeform, Rain, Regicidal Ideation, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 06:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4614291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Henry was upon the throne and Richard in the earth, and the hills were not the same.</i> In which Edward goes hunting, and finds himself chasing a ghost through woods grown fell and fey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Country the Hart Hath Haunted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



> Apart from his association with Richard II, Edward of Aumerle (later of Rutland, even later of York) is today best known for the hunting treatise _The Master of Game_. A copy of it can be read [here](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43452) on Project Gutenberg.

At false-dawn, Edward woke to the scent of rain and loose earth. He felt hot and heavy, half-feverish, although the early morning air chilled every part of him that peeked from beneath the bedclothes. One of his sweet-tempered lymers lay with his head pillowed upon Edward’s thigh, and the other guarded the foot of the bed. Their gangling bodies were warm against his own, and though they did not stir, their solemn eyes regarded him in the darkness. Both hounds whined in protest when he untangled himself from the enclosing heat of his blankets.

With one foot on the floor, one knee still folded under him, Edward reached to stroke the nearer dog behind the ears. Although the fur on Latimer’s back and haunches was coarse, behind those drooping ears, it was sweet as velvet to the touch. Rumbling approval, Latimer tried to situate his chin on Edward’s leg again. "Thou layabout," scolded Edward, soft and fond. "Thou’lt rouse thyself when there’s a hart to chase."

For many dark hours, Edward had lain awake and listened to the rain beating hard upon the roof, until he had half-expected to wake to a second Flood. But God had vowed that the world would not perish again by water, and in this, at least, God had kept his word; when Edward threw open the casement, he found the lawn about the lodge dewed but not drowned. The trees were shining and rain-dark, twisted with thin veils of mist that gleamed white and silver.

 _Richard would have some poetry for this_ , he thought, unbidden. Richard would stand before the window in his shroud, a noble wisp in death as he had been in life, and he would name the trees in his late-spring voice. As he spoke, Edward would gaze across the thin sward to the lowering shadows, and he would watch the paths beneath the canopy grow deep and strange.

And when Edward almost fancied he could hear hunting horns ringing as the fey host rode abroad, Richard would catch his hand as though casually. He would measure Edward’s thick fingers with his own; his rings would press grooves into Edward’s skin. _Surely, cousin, thou must not hunt on such an ill-omened day._

Grief coiled serpent-like in his stomach, a tight knot of muscle and venom and bone. The bitter taste of ashes filled his mouth until he felt he must choke on it.

In the dark wood, a dove called once, a purring murmur like the babble of a brook.

The moment passed. He found that his hands were fixed, white-knuckled and aching, on the windowsill.

At length, Edward straightened from the window. His hounds pricked up their ears as he threw open his wardrobe and dressed himself, but if they found his conduct improper, they had no comment to offer. His lymers had no interest in the pageantry of hunting, the gay parade of lords and ladies with their ermine trim and their banners in emerald and azure and scarlet; they cared not if Edward buckled himself into hunting leathers or if fifteen manservants swathed him in cloth of gold.

By candlelight, he broke his fast on brown bread and smoked venison, with a cup of ale against the morning’s melancholy. In the early days after Richard’s death, he had always spoken a heartfelt prayer before bread touched his lips, but of late his heart had grown curiously silent when he turned his thoughts toward God. _As must any man’s, when he has prayed all his life before the image of a saint and discovered too late that it was the image to which he prayed._

Latimer laid his head upon Edward’s lap. His cold nose touched Edward’s wrist; his breath gusted over the wiry hairs on the back of Edward’s hand. When Latimer’s dark and soulful eyes turned up toward him, Edward knew himself for lost.

Smiling, Edward shredded his venison and slid the last scraps under the table, where Latimer licked them from his hand. Bemond whuffed a faint condemnation at how transparently Edward favored his younger brother, but did not himself deign to beg. He lay on the floor with his nose toward the door and his tail thumping the rush mat, as though he already longed to be away.

It was a wretched day for hunting, but Edward had no cousin to lie abed with him, and so he stepped out of the lodge in the dim, grey dawn. His hounds left dark trails in the sodden grass.

Last night’s rains had ripped limbs from the stout English oaks and driven the streams shrilling over their banks. Every valley was a wound new-opened; every tree bore a fresh white scar. Although Edward had hunted in this wood for many years, alone and with his kin, he found himself pausing at each familiar stone and streambed to mark how the world had altered around it.

This cleft rock, now flowing with rills and falls of clean, sweet rainwater. The star moss that clung to every ledge, soaked and shining, soft beneath Edward’s knuckles.

This gully, now impassable--a heavy tree lay aslant the trail there, its roots wrenched free of the soil and dripping clods of dirt. Edward led his dogs along a spine of exposed stone above the narrow wash, passing close enough to the fallen oak that he could have twined his fingers in those twisted roots.

This stand of thick hazel trees, where Latimer paused and lifted his head from the trackless earth. A familiar fire kindled in his grave, dark eyes.

When Edward hunted alone, Bemond was silent as a ghost beneath the trees, but Edward’s kennel master had trained Latimer from his earliest youth to raise the hue and cry. As he waited for that deep, belling voice to ring across the mist-grey wood, Edward’s heartbeat pounded in his ears like a tambour drumming men to war. He realized that it had been hours since he'd last heard birdsong.

Then Bemond nosed Latimer’s flank, and Latimer turned with white-rimmed eyes and ears laid flat against his skull. His lips skinned back from his teeth; Bemond growled a low warning. Bemond's ears were pricked forward and intent, his tail still curled neatly over his back, but Latimer would have none of that calm. As Latimer strained toward his brother with rear legs splayed as though to spring, Edward wrapped one hand in the leashes and buried the other in Latimer's velvet-soft scruff, shouting, "Stay! Hold, Latimer--" The lymer did not test his master's grip. Instead, he shuddered hard and seemed almost to cringe at the touch, whining his distress.

The three of them stood frozen for a moment, breathing heavily of the chill air, until at last Bemond flicked an ear and lowered his nose to the ground again. He seemed to catch the same scent that held Latimer arrested, but it did not discomfit him; the tension in his body was only the anticipation of the chase. _Not a boar, then,_ Edward thought. _Nothing that Latimer would be right to fear. Bemond knows his work too well to martyr himself to a boar._

Bemond laid his muzzle alongside Latimer's, nose nudging his ear. Edward felt more than heard his steady, quiet breath. Rain began to patter on the hazel leaves overhead, as the damp smell of the dogs' fur rose over the bitter must of loam.

Gradually, with his hound's breathing to set the tempo, Edward's heart grew calm.

He knew not how many minutes he knelt amid the damp moss and rotting hazel leaves, but when he rose again, he felt as though he had been many hours in prayer.

Bemond waited only long enough for Edward to slacken the leashes again before he struck off deeper into the hazel thicket, Latimer close upon his tail. At first, Edward balked at the tightly woven lattice of boughs, but the hounds tugged him onward, and he could not help but follow. By now, the rain was falling in earnest; his boots churned the thick loam to muck.

*

Edward could not mark how far he walked that day, his hounds silent and his beard rain-silvered. His clothes clung and chafed; even the leather had soaked through. The lymers’ wet leashes cut blistering channels into his hands, but he dared not drop the leashes for fear of losing the dogs entirely. Whatever they had scented, whatever drove them like demons across the slick leaf mould, Edward had not caught sight of it.

He had tried to turn back, once, when they crossed a cart trail that he half-remembered, but both dogs had sat in the raised earth between the wheel-ruts and howled a dirge to wake the dead. After that, he had given them their heads. They did not speak again that day, nor did they stop to eat.

The all-pervading silence wore on him worst of all. No hunting horns echoed gaily from tree to tree; not even the birds called out to their kindred. Without any sound but the huff of his own breath, the thick squelch of boot on muck, and the clattering music of rain, he was left without refuge from his thoughts.

Long ago, he and Henry and Richard had chased hart and hind among these hills--but Henry was upon the throne and Richard in the earth, and the hills were not the same.

With the rainclouds thick above the close-knit trees, it was difficult for him to mark how many hours had passed. Instead, he kept time by the ache in his belly, the shock of pain that lanced from heel to knee with every step. At the hunting lodge, he had a patient bay mare who would not shy at milling braches and alaunts--but he had chosen Bemond and Latimer for his hunting companions, and lymers required a hand to the leash.

Even now, he could not bring himself to repent the choice.

When he could no longer make out the shapes of his hounds upon the ground, Edward had to admit that he would not return to the lodge that evening. At a tilted tree, he groped in the darkness until he found a branch stout enough to bear the leashes. Even as he fixed the leather thongs over the bough, the dogs pulled until the tree groaned in protest. "Hold, Latimer," he called into the darkness. "Bemond, hold. The hunt will wait for morning."

When the leashes were secured, he sat in the lee of the trunk and took out his flask. There had been ale in it this morning, but he had drained that by noon, and it had not slaked his thirst. At each stream and new-made waterfall, he had filled the flask again with clean rainwater, and that alone had sustained him on the march.

The water was cold upon his tongue, but the faint breeze was colder. He tasted autumn in the air, under the tang of late-summer lightning.

The dogs licked shredded venison and water from his hands, then paced to the ends of their leashes to sit vigil over the camp. Every now and then, when moonlight pierced the heavy clouds, he caught sight of them hunched like gargoyles in the dimness.

Although every mote of Edward’s body cried for sleep, he found himself as watchful as the hounds. A chill wind sliced over his wet clothes, leaching away the lingering heat of his exertions and driving a spike of ice into his lungs. The wind seemed to pass through him, as though he were no substantial than a shroud. He fancied that if he looked down, he would see his own gleaming white bones.

He saw nothing until a flash of distant lightning silvered the leaves overhead. The dogs sat straighter, as though anticipating a thunderclap, but the wood had grown black again by the time a low rumble echoed over the trees.

Within that blackness, Edward glimpsed a flicker of perfect white, as weak and insubstantial as a candle flame.

He half-rose, but his aching legs shook and would not hold his weight. He got a knee under him and levered himself up by it, then scrubbed a hand over his streaming eyes. By then, the creature was moving cautiously among the midnight columns of the trees.

Edward’s breath caught.

He had at times seen white deer in the wood, most of them so young that he could not tell buck from doe; he had seen white stags emblazoned on banners and brooches in his cousin’s court, and painted in gold and lime-white upon the king’s own altarpiece from Wilton House. The creature before him was as like to those pale shadows as a saint was to his icon.

"Well met," he said, and the hart canted its head. No moonlight glittered in his placid black eyes or shone upon the ridges of horn that crowned his brows, nor did his spotless white coat illuminate the surrounding trees. Edward could not see even the hulking outlines of his hounds, but he heard their leashes creaking as they pulled.

Unhurried, unafraid, the white hart turned away. He did not look back to see whether Edward would follow.

 _I cannot lose him again,_ thought Edward. His chest ached with an emptiness greater than hunger, greater than cold; he seemed to see the pillars of St. Paul's rise one by one before him, each one bent to the vaulted arch of Heaven. His king's body has passed between those pillars on its long sojourn to Langley, and a February gale had shrieked through every gap between glass and lead. Beyond the great rose window lay only slate-grey skies.

Ahead, the white hart neither paused nor slowed. If Edward did not follow, it would escape him. If this were a dream or a fairy-story, he would have known better than to chase a fey creature into the darkness.

He breathed deep of the scent of moss and oak, and the unsavory musk of his hounds. More than the persistent, grinding cold, more even than the continual clatter of rain on leaf, the smell of his hounds convinced him that this was no dream.

His knotted muscles wailed a protest, but he did not heed them. He scrambled to his feet and went crashing through the underbrush after the silent hart.

Behind him, Latimer began to howl--not the eager baying of a hound with his prey in view, but the broken sound of a thing abandoned. While Bemond did not join the cry, Edward could imagine reproach in his long, solemn face. The two of them must be pulling hard upon their leashes now, struggling to follow their master and his quarry. He had known dogs almost to hang themselves thus, more eager to chase than to live.

Edward’s gut twisted at the betrayal of leaving them behind, but he could not turn back. _If I brought them, they would tear my hart to pieces,_ he told himself. He wasn’t sure he believed it.

The white hart did not shy or startle, not even when Latimer’s cries grew sharp-edged with panic. If his hooves left any marks in the soft earth, there was no light by which to track him. Nor was there light to pick out a safe path here, where treacherous stones lay concealed beneath a thin mat of leaves. The undergrowth was thick, as though a swift summer fire had scorched the treetops and let the light filter through to the sleeping bracken. Edward fought onward through ferns like cobwebs and snaring vines, hawthorns with dagger spines. At times, a crack of lightning limned the trees with blazing white light, and he saw himself surrounded on all sides by walls of leaf and limb.

No burrs or brambles caught in the creature’s ice-white fur. He passed unhindered through the night-black wood.

Edward’s thighs ached as though he had run for leagues, and he had to steady himself now and again on a tree as the ground began to slope upward. The white hart was closer now, near enough that Edward could see its breath pluming the air with icy mist. The sight filled him with dread, for although the air was cold--and colder in the wind--it was not yet so cold that the rain had turned to sleet or snow.

Another flash of lightning, this one immediately followed by a peal of thunder. This time, he glimpsed golden eyes in the shadows, and lean-bellied shapes pacing him as he ran.

Before that moment, Edward had never seen a wolf in this wood.

The trees opened around a ridge of stone, and atop that stone stood the creature that Edward had pursued. Richard’s face was grave beneath his branching crown; his long, spare body was robed in white. He held a hand out to Edward, but did not stoop to help him climb.

"Wait for me," Edward whispered. He bent to climb the ridge on hands and knees, although the stone bit cruelly into his briar-sliced palms. All around him, he heard the wolves’ padding tread.

At the spine of the ridge, Edward stood. The sky opened up before him in banks of fog and moonlight, shot through with lightning like the veins of a vast black opal.

He looked down at Richard’s hand, still open between them, palm upturned, and he closed the distance between them to take it.

Edward was close enough to feel the bone-snapping cold rising from that hand when his foot caught on a mossy stone and slid free. He hung suspended for an eternity, milling his arms as loose rock shifted beneath his feet. Then his knee buckled, and he fell.

Richard’s eyes were soft and touched with grief as Edward tumbled from the ridge--but they were not kind, and he did not raise a hand to catch his cousin.

Edward could do little more than cover his head and tuck in his legs as he fell from the peak. His shoulders struck jagged stones with enough force to wrench one arm from its socket; tangles of briars snatched at him but could not slow his descent. He slithered screaming over wet leaves and careened into a hawthorn tree perched on the very edge of a ledge, but the tree snapped under his weight and fell with him to the foot of the ridge.

Later, he would think that the hawthorn had saved his life. When he rolled at last to a shuddering stop among the roots of a hoary oak, the tree took the brunt of the blow. Its limbs shattered with a stench like corpserot.

Edward lay among the ruins of the hawthorn and breathed as deeply as he could, seeking any pain that might mean snapped ribs or a broken collarbone. When he found himself sound, he set his shoulder against the oak and forced his arm back into place.

Atop the ridge, he could see neither Richard nor the hart. In a flash of lightning, though, he saw the long, lean shapes of wolves descending the ridge.

 _I wish I had untied the hounds_ , he thought, as he propped himself between two thick roots and groped for his knife. His bow had broken in the fall.

Another flicker of lightning, and he saw that the wolves would be upon him in moments. He whispered a prayer for his soul and Richard’s as he raised the knife to gut the first wolf.

A howl split the night, but no wolf’s cry was so glad or so dire. From the forest at his back came a sudden, heavy crash, like the passage of a dozen hunting hounds--and leading the charge was Latimer, howling a challenge to the sky.

Latimer and Bemond leapt the roots of the oak together and crouched before their master as though they stood between him and Hell itself. Even gentle-tempered Bemond was snarling as he turned this way and that, snapping at unseen flanks and tails.

When next the lightning came, the wolves were gone. Edward caught a glimpse of his lymers standing sentinel in the darkness with a broken branch between them, their leashes still tied fast to the bough.

*

The next day, the dogs did not harry him onward. He awakened with their heads on his lap and his knife still clenched in his good hand, with deep bruises on every part of him and his clothes soaked in rain and blood. The wolves had left a confusion of deep tracks in the muck at the foot of the oak tree, but they had not pressed their attack while he had lain asleep, and for that, he said a heartfelt prayer of thanks.

In the grey daylight, Edward saw how far he had fallen. The hawthorn’s jagged stump lay ten ells up the limestone face, and the summit, more than twice that. He had known men to die from lesser falls. Even in full, unclouded day, he would have hesitated to climb that peak. To have done so in the blackness of midnight, with a dead man urging him on …

But when he scaled the rocks again, spider-cautious, he found two perfect cloven hoofprints in the moss where Richard had stood. He sat there for a moment, with Latimer milling anxiously on a lower ledge and Bemond waiting for them at the foot of the hill, and he remembered Richard’s long, sad face under the clouded sky.

Perhaps Richard could not have saved him, even had he wanted to. If his hand had closed on Edward’s, would it have passed through bone and sinew with no more than a whisper of cold?

 _It might have been enough, to have held his hand in mine one last time._ Edward turned the knife over and over again in his stiff fingers. No matter which way he turned it, the steel caught only the faintest grey light.

This knife had almost spilled a king’s lifeblood, on a day not long past. As he had knelt to receive his pardon from Henry the usurper, he had asked himself whether it would be any different to murder his cousin than to speed a fallen hind to her death.

He had knelt ready to give his life to return Richard to the throne--but Henry had taken his hand, and raised him up with such compassion in his eyes that Edward’s breath had stilled. _Intended or committed was this fault?_ Henry had asked, as though he understood the dire purpose that had brought Edward to his feet. And when Edward had not answered, his cousin had granted that pardon all the same.

Richard had loved his men well, but he had not trusted them, and he had never compassionated them.

Edward’s knife had remained in its sheath that day. As he sat upon the promontory and watched the scudding clouds reflected on his blade, he found that he was not sorry.

In a hollow under the ridge lay a spring, quickened to new life by the recent storms. The water smelled faintly of sulfur, but it was sweet and fresh upon his tongue, and he filled his flask as his dogs drank their fill. If there had been dry wood, he would have lit a fire to dry his clothes and ease the all-pervading chill, but he could find nothing dry enough to burn.

If he did not return to the lodge, Edward would die in the forest. He knew this in the same way that he knew that he must harbor the white hart, wherever his lair.

Edward struck out again into the forest, letting Latimer and Bemond have their heads. Both hounds were mud-brindled, their narrow muzzles drawn with what might have been exhaustion as easily as purpose. For all they looked as worn as he felt, though, Latimer’s ears had a hopeful set to them, and Bemond never pulled the leash harder than Edward’s injured left arm could bear. Above all, both seemed pleased to be free of the branch.

The dogs led him into gently sloping woodlands, where the ancient oaks stood aloof from one another. Their verdant boughs were touched with flashes of gold, muted in the grey light but no less lovely for their dimness. Banks of hart’s-tongue ferns rose between the trees in countless emerald spears. Once, Edward heard a trilling chaffinch somewhere among the branches, and his heart swelled with gladness at the song.

These were no longer the woods where he had hunted in his youth, but not all within them was fell or fey. There was music under the sheltering oaks that was sweeter than any played in court, and beasts that had never known the fear of man. When Edward halted to rest, a black fox slipped out from a stand of stunted furze and regarded the three interlopers placidly for long moments, then turned away as though she had business elsewhere to attend. Her paws made no sound on the thick green moss.

If it hadn’t been for the icy edge to the air, Edward might have lingered beneath the oaken colonnades and listened to the birds calling from branch to branch. But when the wind rose again, so did he.

After a time, the rain began again. Thick droplets pelted the yellow leaves and sent them spiraling to earth in a shower of gold. Through that golden curtain, Edward glimpsed a flash of white.

This time, neither he nor the dogs ran. Latimer’s nose skimmed over the ground, seeking a trace that was more than scent--a skin of ice on the leaves. The feeling, inarticulable but certain, that death had been here.

Bemond cast a glance over his shoulder; _Shall we chase him?_ it seemed to ask. As though Edward could do any other thing than chase.

Whatever it was Latimer was seeking, he found it amid the bracken, and he struck off without a bark of warning. Although he was tall even for a lymer, the dense ferns quickly hid him from view, and Edward had to follow him by the tug of the leash and the way the ferns bent at his passage.

He could no longer see the white hart, either, but it pulled him onward nonetheless.

Latimer brought them down a hill to a swollen mere, in which fallen leaves had slowly blackened until the pool seemed a wine-dark mirror of the sky. Rain sluiced freely over the water, unhindered by the oaks that bent in on every side. Edward picked his way among straggling sedges and tussocks of brown grass until Latimer led him away from the water’s edge.

The hart’s trail led through a narrow defile with a stream cutting down the center. On both sides rose walls of stone curtained in ferns and yellow trailing tormentil, in places so close at either side that Edward could scarcely pass between them. Here, at least, was some shelter from the relentless rain, although the air was still cool and smelled of wet stone. Deer had come to the water to drink, or so said the sharp prints in the mud along the streambed, but none of them was Edward’s hart. He knelt and made a cup of his free hand, sharing water with hounds and absent prey as though taking sacrament.

Edward glanced backward, up the hill. Framed by the chasm’s sheer walls stood the white hart; there were golden oak leaves twisted in his antlered crown, and leaves falling upon him like rain. Almost, Edward spoke Richard’s name--he felt it welling on his lips, loud and animal--

\--and then a wall of water came rushing down the gully and lifted Edward from his feet. His fingers tightened reflexively on the leashes as wave after wave rolled over him and filled his mouth with water and blackened leaves. A torrential rush of sound rang in his ears; he was at the heart of a thunderclap, with the dogs howling to break the sky.

Then the dogs were silent, and still the awful music went on. Edward tried to snatch a fistful of ferns, a rope of tormentil, but they uprooted in his hand and were washed away with him. He got his head above water only long enough to take a gasping breath before then the current dragged him under again.

Again and again, he struck the close walls of the defile, and each time he turned and spun like a leaf in the churning rapids. _I must not let the dogs be drowned,_ he thought in a wild moment of clarity. Hand over hand, he clawed his way from the ends of the leashes to Bemond’s collar, and then Latimer’s. Although his left arm shrieked a protest, he gathered both of the dogs into his arms and forced their heads free of the surface.

It might have been hours or seconds before the narrow passage widened into a valley; Edward knew only that the floodwater’s roaring din gave way suddenly to a sweet descant. His bootsoles dug into a deep bed of silt at the bottom of the streambed. Still the water hurried him onward, but he could get his feet under him now--and slowly, step by sucking step, he crawled from the muck with a dog under each arm.

Bemond rose at once to shake himself, while Latimer lay panting and shivering on the leaf mould. Edward clasped Latimer against his chest, stroking his sopping ears and calling him _good boy, sweet boy_ until their trembling was more from cold than terror.

Somewhere in the wood, a nuthatch gave a laughing whistle. A gold-edged leaf drifted down from the canopy above and landed upon Edward’s breast, and there he let it lie.

He thought he slept, but he did not dream. When he opened his eyes, the wood was darker, and Bemond lay curled against his back. Not far from them, the stream sang on.

"We must keep going," he told his hounds, although he did not know where he meant to take them.

The stream widened as he followed it, fed by silver tributaries until the water seemed both broad and deep. Surely it would lead out of the forest, to a city or the sea--if indeed this were a mortal forest, and if one could ever be out of it.

By now, hunger was his constant companion. He had eaten a mouthful of smoked venison this morning, at the foot of the white hart’s peak, but now his stomach cleaved to his spine as though he had eaten nothing at all. The flood had taken the last of his smoked venison, and it had ripped the flask from his belt; it had left him nothing but his knife, and that was surely beginning to rust in its sheath.

_If the wolves come again, no power on earth will save us._

On the bank of the swollen brook, Edward sat on a stone and caught his breath. Here, alders clad in lacy lichens clasped palms across the water, like grave dancers in a fairy court. A well-worn trail led down to the stream, but what creatures drank there, Edward couldn’t have said. Boars had not wallowed in the shallows, nor sharpened their tusks on the rocks and roots near the stream. Young stags had not scraped their antlers clean on the rough alder bark. No tracks remained in the bare earth to betray a cautious hare.

Latimer thrust his nose into Edward’s palm. Although the rain had stopped an hour since, Latimer’s face was wet all over, and quite cold to the touch. Whatever fear had seized him in the hazel thicket, he had mastered it during their long march, and now his face was tranquil and trusting. A pang of guilt licked at Edward’s lowest ribs--it was one thing to lose himself on a mad quest, but quite another to let his dogs catch an ague. "It will be night soon," said Edward softly. "Thou’lt freeze, or drown, or sink into the mud. Wilt thou not go back? I know thou knowest the way."

Latimer’s eyes tracked across the brook. A fine shimmer of mist rose from the still water in the shallows, twisting in lazy eddies where the arrow-swift current sliced through the fog.

The dogs’ leashes fell from his fingers, but Latimer and Bemond did not stir from his feet. They had found their quarry.

On the far bank, the white hart dipped his muzzle to the water and drank. Not a fleck of rotting leaf nor a droplet of mud clung to his white legs.

When the hart raised his head again, he regarded Edward with eloquent eyes. In the twilight, the hart’s coat gleamed moon-bright, and every point of his black antlers was a star.

He almost fancied that he heard the horns of the fey host winding from the far shore, and the tramp of cloven hooves upon unearthly ground. There would be poetry there, poetry enough to tell all of the griefs that he could not bring himself to speak--and in the white-robed king’s court, there would be no further need for grief.

On the far side of the bank, he would know the hills as he had in his boyhood.

The glutted brook lay between them like a blade. Edward understood in his marrow, in his water, what it would mean to cross to the other side. Perhaps he had known it from the moment that Richard had held out his hand on the high peak.

Latimer rested his muzzle on Edward’s thigh. He made no sound, not the faintest whine of protest or condemnation; if Edward rose now and threw off his sodden clothes, waded into the swift-moving stream and followed the hart into the world beyond, he thought that Latimer and Bemond would be no more than a whisper behind him.

He scratched Latimer lightly behind the ears, and did not stand. The white hart stood still, unmoving, unmoved.

"Thank you, cousin," said Edward, low but carrying. "I wish that I could join you. With all my heart, I wish it."

No answer came. After a moment, the hart turned from the shore and picked his way up the far bank, over stone and branch and into the dark woods beyond. Edward sat vigil until he could no longer make out the glimmer of white through the alders, and then until the bone-white moon rose over the English oaks beyond.

A horn sounded in the distance, but it was neither fey nor wild. Soon, another horn answered, and then there came a distant burst of laughter. Edward climbed slowly to his feet, feeling every muscle ache. Through the trees to the north, from whence he had heard the second horn, he saw a ruddy gleam like torches or lamps.

Who hunted these woods now, he did not know--but there would be warm light and laughter in their party. Perhaps they would tease him merrily for holding his own hounds’ leashes, or share their wine and game with him; perhaps they would only see him back to his lodge and leave him to soothe his empty belly with brown bread and smoked venison and a cup of ale.

There would be banners emblazoned with the heraldry of his kinsmen, although he would not see the white stag couchant there.

He spared a last glance across the brook. Then, catching the leashes in his hand once more, Edward turned his face toward the lights.


End file.
